Walt Disney Imagineering
I spent the summer of 2000 working as an intern in the Research and Development Department of Walt Disney Imagineering in Glendale, California. While there, I worked on Enhanced Television, a project involving ABC and GO.com.
The basic premise of Enhanced Television was to enhance the television viewing experience by providing synchronized web content for viewers with an internet connected computer in the same room as their television. The content is often interactive and can take the form of live polls, trivia questions, and play-along games.
I worked on the client side of Enhanced Television, which involved a lot of coordination with the television production staff in New York. They would sit in the ETV van at the Monday Night Football game and generate the live content that was sent to our servers. Since the TV production staff didn't know much about HTML or Javascript (and I didn't know the first thing about TV production), this created some interesting challenges in communication and software interface design. The result of our efforts was a series of design templates and a tool that allowed the content creators to specify the layout of an Enhanced TV graphic by quickly filling in fields with relevant information.
It was exciting to be involved in a web project that twenty thousand people would watch and enjoy. Perhaps the highlight of the experience was when my Disney coworkers wished me a happy 21st birthday in the message area of the Enhanced TV client, where everyone watching the Enhanced TV broadcast could see:
It was also exciting when the results of Enhanced TV polls began to be integrated into the live broadcasts. This was the first time that home viewers could truly interact with the show they were watching.
This T-shirt design was inspired by my summer
internship at Disney Imagineering.
